Sunday, December 27, 2015

Hejira

First off, SHADOW PROOF. I was asked in an e-mail if I could note the website. Kevin Gostztola is posting articles there. He can offer strong reporting. It's a new site, I'm not sure when it went active, and I'm noting it at the top.

Let's move to the Pentagon which announced today:

Strikes in Iraq

Fighter, attack, bomber, and remotely piloted aircraft conducted 28 strikes in Iraq, coordinated with and in support of the Iraqi government:

-- Near Mosul, seven strikes
struck six separate ISIL tactical units, destroying 15 ISIL fighting
positions, two ISIL vehicles, an ISIL heavy machine gun, an ISIL bunker,
four ISIL assembly areas and three ISIL command control nodes, as well
as cratering two ISIL roads and denying ISIL access to terrain.

-- Near Ramadi, four strikes
destroyed two ISIL tactical vehicles, an ISIL vehicle-borne bomb, a
factory and a staging location for ISIL vehicle-borne bombs, an ISIL
building, two houses ISIL had rigged with explosives, an ISIL staging
area and an ISIL fighting position. The strikes also denied ISIL access
to terrain.

-- Near Sinjar, six strikes struck
two separate ISIL tactical units, destroying two fighting positions,
two bridges and two culverts ISIL had used.

-- Near Tal Afar, seven strikes struck four bridges and a culvert ISIL had used and destroyed 12 ISIL bunkers.

-- Near Fallujah, two strikes
struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL heavy machine gun
position, bridge ISIL had used, an ISIL bunker and an ISIL beddown
location.

-- Near Kisik, one strike struck an ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL vehicle and an ISIL tunnel.

Operation Inherent Resolve officials also provided details of four Dec. 25 strikes that were not included in yesterday’s update:

Near Manbij, Syria, one strike
struck an ISIL tactical unit. Near Ramadi, Iraq, three strikes struck a
large ISIL tactical unit and destroyed an ISIL anti-air artillery
position, five ISIL staging locations, two houses ISIL had rigged with
explosives, three ISIL weapon caches, three ISIL fighting positions, an
ISIL vehicle-borne bomb, two ISIL resupply locations and an ISIL
vehicle. The strikes near Ramadi also cratered five roads ISIL had used,
damaged an ISIL tactical vehicle and wounded ISIL fighters.

Task force officials define a
strike as one or more kinetic events that occur in roughly the same
geographic location to produce a single, sometimes cumulative, effect.
Therefore, officials explained, a single aircraft delivering a single
weapon against a lone ISIL vehicle is one strike, but so is multiple
aircraft delivering dozens of weapons against buildings, vehicles and
weapon systems in a compound, for example, having the cumulative effect
of making those targets harder or impossible for ISIL to use.
Accordingly, officials said, they do not report the number or type of
aircraft employed in a strike, the number of munitions dropped in each
strike, or the number of individual munition impact points against a
target.

Iraqi
forces have retaken control of a government compound long held by ISIS
in Ramadi, an important gain that could signal ISIS' imminent exit from
the key city.

Following days of
fighting as ISIS militants fought to defend the compound, the resistance
ended, and Iraqi forces found that the ISIS fighters had withdrawn,
Col. Mohammed Ibrahim , a spokesman for Iraq's Joint Operations Command,
told CNN.

"The
government compound is under our full control," Ibrahim said. "This
does not mean we have entered the compound. It means it is fully
surrounded and fully under our control."

Most
ISIS fighters, who had been using the government compound as a
headquarters, fled or were killed in airstrikes and fighting on the
ground, Ibrahim said.

That's not really a victory.

I guess the fact that Iraqi forces have yet to desert the battle qualifies as a 'success' for those with relatively low expectations.

More to the point, as most observers have pointed out the issue won't be running the Islamic State out of Ramadi, the issue will be what happens afterwards.

Priss pots would do well to stop cackling and start calling out human rights abuses -- and human rights abuses are not just being carried out by the Islamic State.

I'm traveling in some vehicleI'm sitting in some cafeA defector from the petty warsThat shell shock love away
-- "Hejira," written by Joni Mitchell, first appears on her album of the same name

The number of US service members the Dept of Defense states died in the Iraq War is [PDF format warning] 4497 (plus 10 in Operation Inherent Resolve which includes at least 1 Iraq War fatality).

About Me

We do not open attachments. Stop e-mailing them. Threats and abusive e-mail are not covered by any privacy rule. This isn't to the reporters at a certain paper (keep 'em coming, they are funny). This is for the likes of failed comics who think they can threaten via e-mails and then whine, "E-mails are supposed to be private." E-mail threats will be turned over to the FBI and they will be noted here with the names and anything I feel like quoting.
This also applies to anyone writing to complain about a friend of mine. That's not why the public account exists.